The Colors of Water

Drifting through a painted morning with watercolorist Dale Whittaker

Just off the starboard bow I catch the glimmer of a dock light. Then the white deck chairs I was told would let me know I have the right place come into focus. It is five a.m. right on time for the planned pickup on the western shore of Madeline Island. Up the North Channel, the not-yet-risen sun is painting the calm waters with wisps of red. I smile. It is going to be like boating through a watercolor painting, I think to myself, each wave a brushstroke. And there on the dock, waving, is the person I’ve come to meet.

Ever since we bought the Little Dipper I’ve wanted this boat to be something other than just simple transportation. Could it be more than a way to the islands, I wondered? Could it be a way into the islands as well?

Often trip planning requires a focus on the elements of the outer landscape - where the campsites are, what bays make for good anchorages, the mileages of trails we will hike. But with every trip into a wild place, there is another voyage going on as well. The places we travel through touch us as we touch them, change us, inspire us. I wanted to use the Little Dipper as a vessel to explore the outer landscape of course, but also to see if I could use it as a means of bringing into focus the inner landscape of these islands as well.

One way to begin to do that is to see it, or at least glimpse it, through the eyes of others. Wherever I have traveled in my writing and photography career, I have often sought out the company of artists — Canadian landscape painter Margaret Florence Ludwig in the high Arctic, David Rosenthal who paints glaciers in Alaska, Bo Bartlett at his summer home on Wheaton Island off the coast of Maine. This morning I have invited watercolorist Dale Whittaker to share a sunrise in the Apostles.

The Little Dipper eases up to the dock just north of Sunset Bay, Dale steps in, his backpack of art supplies slung across his shoulder. Lifejacket on, coffee mug in hand, we push off up the channel aimed straight into a watercolor morning.

As we curl up the shore of Basswood Island and then make the crossing to the southern tip of Hermit, I think of the role that art has played in the creation of our national park system. We often give credit to geologists and geographers, surveyors, politicians and local boosters. But when President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone Act on March 1, 1872 creating not only this country’s first national park but the first such park in the world, not a single member of the Congress that voted 115 to 65 to create that park had ever been to Yellowstone. It may as well have been the moon for how distant and unreachable the place was in the 1870’s. Their votes were won over not just by scientists and railroad tycoons but by the “portfolio of proof” created by writer Gustavus Doane, landscape artist Thomas Moran, and photographer William Henry Jackson working together to prove the beauty, even the very existence, of such an otherworldly landscape known as Yellowstone as part of the 1871 Ferdinand Hayden Expedition.

Doane, Moran, and Jackson

It was stories, photographs, and paintings as much as the weight of scientific or economic statistics that tipped the scales in favor of creating Yellowstone National Park, sparking what today is our National Park system.

“Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone” by Thomas Moran, 1872

The Apostles too have long inspired artists and through them, us. The Ojibwe, whose roots run deeper here than the white pines, have long told stories, danced intricate dances, and done beautiful beadwork infused with the movement and beauty of the lake and these islands. From the famous, like landscape artist Albert Bierstadt who painted Lake Superior to Emmanuel Luick, twenty-nine years the keeper of the Sand Island Light who captured life on Sand Island in early photographs, to a fisherman’s wife penning poetry in the margins of her diary on storm-bound days, these islands have long moved us to poetry, to song, to painting, to art.

And to a morning sharing the sunrise gleaming off the cliffs of Hermit Island aboard the Little Dipper. We have hardly cut the engine when Dale breaks out his painting supplies — a collapsible bucket which he dips into Lake Superior for water, a plastic lid to act as a palette, a pair of brushes, and begins to paint the light glowing in the cliff walls.

The Artist's Tools

There is a poetry to doing a watercolor painting of Lake Superior using the water of Lake Superior, I tell him as we settle in to a slow drift down the gallery of cliff faces, the clatter of gulls announcing the morning.

I watch him working quickly, glancing between the piece of watercolor paper on his lap and the cliffs drifting slowly by, blocking in the structure, trying to catch the colors, the light, the leading lines as it all shape-shifts before our very eyes.

“I look for a focal point” he tells me, not breaking the stride of his work, “something to draw the viewer into the piece.” I watch that piece appearing beneath his brushstrokes, my own eyes now darting back and forth between the cliff face and the painting being created before me.

We talk of light, how colors reflect off of each other when they are put nearby on paper, of “carving in” the shadows.

For a long time, we sit almost motionless in a deep grotto, a claw mark where the waves have gouged deep into the island and speak of the irony of being in a place created by the violence of the lake on such a calm, almost breathless morning. There, Dale notices a stand of trees lining the cliff above us and begins speaking of putting the “mystery” in a painting, something to lead the viewer from the focal point to the trail of wondering what is around the next bend in the bay or beyond the picket fence of pine trees at the edge of an island. I see his eyes focused on that line of trees, his brush moving almost by itself on his paper.

(Watercolor “Study” by Dale Whittaker used by permission of the artist)

As slowly as shadows moving, the morning passes, the light shifts, and we shift to eating scones, sharing coffee, swapping stories. Before dropping him off again at his dock, we take a quick swing into Quiet Cove on Oak Island. Although the light has gone hard, the softness of the morning sharp-edged now, there is a moment that sticks in my mind.

We hear a fishing tug approaching just off shore, and pull away from the cliffs a bit to be safe from its wake. As we wait, we again fall into talk of light, of how doing art gives us permission to see beneath the surface of things into the heart of a place and maybe even into our own hearts. Just then, the wake hits us and for an instant the lake beneath us comes alive, swirled, as if by a giant brushstroke. I laugh out loud as we are bounced about by the waves. Here we are in the Little Dipper, on Lake Superior, adrift for a moment in a watercolor painting.

— to see more of Dale Whittaker’s work, visit the website of the Bell Street Gallery by clicking the button below: